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MEMORIAL ADDRESS 



OX THE LATE 



MARSHALL PINCKNEY WILDER 



PRESIDENT 



NEWENGLAND HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY 



BY THE 
REV ANDREW r'PEABODY D.D., LL.D. 



[DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY JANUARY 1% JSSS] 



BOSTON 
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY 

1888 



tr. e 






<ti& 



SALEM 
rRIXTED AT THE SALEM PRESS 

1888 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



At the annual meeting of the New England Historic 
Genealogical Society, January 5, 1887, it was voted that 
an address in memory of the late president, Marshall 
Pinckney Wilder, LL.D., be delivered before the Society 
at a convenient time, and the matter was referred to the 
Directors with full powers. The Rev. Dr. Peabody ac- 
cepted an invitation to perform the duty, and a committee 
of arrangements was chosen consisting of the president, Mr. 
Abner C. Goodell, Jr., the Rev. Henry A. Hazen, the 
Hon. Charles L. Flint, Mr. Hamilton A. Hill and Mr. 
Cyrus Woodman. The time fixed for the address was 
Wednesday, January 18, 1888, and the Massachusetts 
Horticultural Society opened its Hall for the occasion. A 
large number of ladies and gentlemen were present, the 
latter representing various societies and institutions in 
which Mr. Wilder had been interested. The president, 
Mr. Goodell, opened the proceedings with the following 
remarks : 

u Fkiends and Associates : 

"When a good man dies — one who has contributed to the el- 
evation and happiness of his fellow-men by his example of pure 

(3) 



A INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 

and noble living, or by his resistance, either in the field, through 
the press, or on the rostrum, to some great public wrong, or by 
his successful efforts to increase the physical comfort or the in- 
tellectual growth of mankind — the living pause not merety to 
lament and condole : the shock, the grief, the sense of irretriev- 
able loss, are accompanied by a desire to know more of his char- 
acter and his personal history ; to trace his 

"Foot-prints on the sands of time;" 
to review his acts of beneficence ; to commend his example ; to 
compare his deeds with those of other benefactors who have 
preceded him, and to assign to him a place in the temple of fame. 

This is the purpose to which we are to devote a brief hour 
stolen from the routine of life's duties to-day. 

On Thursday, the lGth of December, 1886, expired Marshall 
Pinckney Wilder, who for nineteen years, by successive annual 
elections, held the office of President of the New England His- 
toric Genealogical Society, to the members of which he was en- 
deared, not more by the munificent gifts which the Society had 
received through his exertions, than by strong personal attach- 
ments formed independently of the official relations he held to 
them. 

Appropriate notice of his decease was taken at the annual 
meeting of the Society last year ; and it was resolved by the 
Board of Directors to set apart a special time for a commemora- 
tive discourse, at a place convenient for the assembling, not 
onl} r of the members of this Society, but of others who have been 
associated with him in trade, in offices of trust and honor, or as 
members of other corporate bodies. 

The hour appointed in accordance with that resolution has 
arrived, and the life now closed is to be fittingly reviewed by 
one preeminently qualified for the task, who has laid aside other 
duties in order to gratify the wish of the Society that he address 
us upon this occasion. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



This gentleman, universally beloved and venerated in New 
England, needs no introduction. It, therefore, only remains 
for me to ask yon to listen to the words of the Rev. Dr. Pea- 
body." 

At a meeting of the Directors of the Society, January 
23, 1888, a vote was unanimously adopted, heartily thank- 
ing Dr. Peabody for his address, and asking for a copy 
for publication. He complied with the request, and the 
discourse is now printed under the direction of the com- 
mittee of arrangements. 



ADDRESS. 



St. Paul advised Titus to avoid genealogies, not, 
however, those of men, but those of the a^ons with 
which in complicated series of mystic generations 
the Gnostic theosophy had peopled the entire realm 
between God and man. As to human genealogies, 
inasmuch as Titus was a Christian pastor, St. Paul, 
I have no doubt, would have bidden him to study 
them, and would have told him that they were fully 
of as much worth to him in making him acquainted 
with the flock of Cretians under his charge as the 
pedigree of their sheep could be to the shepherds 
on Mount Ida. The diagnosis of his parents and 
his grandparents is the prognosis, the horoscope of 
the child. "We have many New England surnames 
which stand this day for traits bodily, mental and 
moral that belonged to those who bore the same 
names two hundred or tAVO hundred and fifty years 
nfjro. In some cases the traits .are intensified in 
their transmission; in others, where there has been 
intermarriage with families of strong peculiarities, 
they are slightly attenuated. In the children of 
the female members of one of these old families, 
you can alwa} r s trace tokens of the mother's lineage, 



Q N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 

which may, however, cease to be distinctly observ- 
able in their children. Thus all the Wilders that 
I have known have belonged to the normal "Wilder 
type, and so have the children of mothers who were 
Wilders; but in their children I have sometimes 
failed to recognize the type. 

The Wilders, in general, have a substantial 
physique, stout without plethora, fitted to do good 
service, to wear well and to last long. In mind, 
they have ability rather than genius. They have 
method, exactness, large powers of acquisition, the 
capacity to utilize to the full whatever they acquire, 
and a sufficient degree of reasonable self-confidence 
to secure such success as they merit. T should not 
expect to find poets among them ; but Professor Burt 
Green Wilder, who has no superior, few equals, as 
a scientist in certain departments of physiology, be- 
longs by good right to the family whose name he 
bears. The same mental characteristics, with a dif- 
ferent training, would make the expert accountant, 
the skilled and far-seeing financier, the deservedly 
prosperous merchant, the citizen, who, by integrity, 
discretion and public spirit wins and holds a lead- 
er's place among his fellow-citizens. The family 
has had among its members no small amount of 
enterprise, judicious, however, not rash, hazardous 
or speculative; and, what is of more worth, it has 
shown tenacity of purpose and persistency of en- 
deavor. The number of college graduates among 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. Q 

them has been comparatively small. This, perhaps, 
is cine mainly to the fact that the principal family- 
centres have not been on what I might call college 
meridians. Among the graduates that the family 
has furnished there have not been wanting eminent 
scholars ; and in the college class next before my 
own there was a Wilder very near the head of the 
class, whom his classmates regarded as second to 
no one among them in ability, moral worth and 
high promise, but who died in less than six months 
after graduating. 

As regards moral character, the Wilder family 
has been above the plane of virtuous mediocrity. 
There are, on the family tree, no branches and few 
offshoots which they might wish to have pruned 
away, many that have borne rich fruit. The first 
immigrant Wilders were undoubtedly among those 
who sought in the infant colony a religions asylum, 
and the general aspect of the line gives the impres- 
sion of pervading religions faith and reverence. 
The family have, in great part, remained in the 
ranks of normal New England orthodoxy, the chief 
divergence, so far as I can learn, having been where 
I should not have expected it, toward Swedenbor- 
gianism. 

The Wilder family originated in Berks county, 
England, where Nicholas Wilder, an adherent and 
friend of Henry VII., received as a gift from him 
a valuable estate still in the possession of his de- 



10 



N. E. HISTORIC GEXEALOGIC SOCIETY. 



scendants. Thomas Wilder, who was born on that 
estate, emigrated to New England, became a mem- 
ber of the church in Charlestown in 1640, and was 
one of the earliest settlers of Nashawena, now Lan- 
caster, whither he removed in 1654, and where he 
owned a farm of five hundred acres. He was one 
of the selectmen of the new town. He seems to 
have been a man of high character and of no little 
influence, and it appears from records still extant 
that, as a church member, he maintained the rights 
of the brethen as against clerical encroachment and 
domination. 

Ephraim, of the sixth generation from him, was 
born in the part of Lancaster that is now Sterling, 
was one of the chief men in the town and county, 
held various and important public offices, and was 
a member of the Massachusetts Convention that 
adopted the Constitution of the United States. He 
married Lncretia, the daughter of Samuel Locke, 
a native of "Woburn, who early became a resident 
and a large landholder in Lancaster, and was favor- 
ably known as a business man, an office-holder and 
a man of intelligence, integrity and honor. This 
Lncretia Locke was the sister, probably the stronger 
sister, of a learned, but weak man, who was for 
three or four years president of Harvard College, 
and who signalized himself by delivering an ora- 
tion in Chaldee at the Commencement succeeding 
his election to office, which, it is safe to affirm, is 






MARSHALL P. WILDER. 21 

more than any one of his successors could have 
done. 

The Locke family with which Ephraim Wilder 
became allied by marriage, has in its register a 
wonderfully large number and diversity of honored 
names, and brings this branch of the Wilder family 
into kindred more or less remote with not a few men 
of eminent reputation in literature, in the learned 
professions and in public life. The ninth and young- 
est child of this marriage was Samuel Locke Wil- 
der, who was born in 1778. He was the father of 
our late president. His brother Josiah, eight years 
his senior, in 1791 established himself in Rindge, 
IS". H., opening one of those general country stores, 
in which it was hard to say what commodities of use, 
ornament or luxury could not be found, and which 
were the proereant cradles of many of the largest 
fortunes of a former generation. His brother Sam- 
uel went with him as his clerk, and a few years later 
became his partner. Samuel's record is worthy of 
reverent and grateful memory by his posterity. He 
was one of those strong pillars of the social fabric, 
which, while they stand firm, look as if they could 
never be replaced. He represented the town of 
Rindge in the legislature for thirteen years, and 
was a justice of the peace for forty-seven years. He 
was a loyal member of the Congregational church, 
and its pastor's faithful coadjutor in Christian work. 
He seems to have been associated with whatever 



12 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETV. 



could contribute to the well-being of the community, 
and, best of all, he gave it his own example of a 
blameless, pure, upright and beneficent life. A not 
unlike character had been borne by Jonathan Sher- 
win, whose tenth and youngest child in 1797 became 
the wife of Samuel Locke Wilder. The distinguished 
moral worth and power of usefulness which evident- 
ly marked the Sherwin famity in their quiet rural 
homes, became conspicuous in Thomas Sherwin, 
Mrs. Wilder's nephew, who is well remembered as 
principal of the English High School of this city, 
and as one of the great teachers who have made 
their profession illustrious. Mrs. Wilder possessed 
in rich measure the gifts and graces of a truly Chris- 
tian woman, and lived to train under the best home 
influences a family of nine children, seven of whom, 
the youngest then nearly thirty years of age, sur- 
vived her. 

I have in hand ample and interesting materials for 
a much fuller family history. Did time permit, I 
should use them; for a large and often the best part 
of a man's life is written before he is born, and un- 
less he has taken pains to unwrite it, needs to be 
rewritten in his biography. Our president entered 
on a good inheritance; it remains for me to show 
how he used it. 

Our president, the eldest child of Samuel Locke 
and Annie Sherwin Wilder, was born at Rindge, on 
the 22d of September, 1798. Why he was named 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



13 



Marshall Pinckney I do not know, but I can easily 
conjecture. I can find no Marshall Pinckney in any 
dictionary of American biography. But our pres- 
ident's father was a zealous Federalist, and there 
was no subsequent time when there was more in- 
tense party feeling than in 1798. At that time John 
Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, both 
eminent in the Federalist ranks, and united in a mis- 
sion to France with Elbridge Gerry, had been ousted 
with gross indignity by the French revolutionary 
government, while their democratic colleague Gerry 
had been suffered to remain. A cry of indignation 
ran through the land. The rejected envoys became 
the twin idols of their party, and young Wilder, as 
I suppose, expressed his sense of the outrage in- 
flicted on them, and of their transcendent merit, by 
conferring on his first-born the two names then in- 
separable in honor with one of the great political 
parties, and in abuse by the other. 

Kinclge was settled by persons of a high order 
of intelligence for their time, as was that whole re- 
gion of New Hampshire. In addition to the public 
schools, a private school was generally maintained, 
and we find on the list of teachers Dr. Payson, of 
Portland, then a recent graduate of Harvard; and 
there are others, if of less eminence, Avell known 
for their ability and social standing. Young Mar- 
shall began to go to school at four years of age, and 
that he was not an unapt pupil may be inferred from 



14 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



an extant letter of his, written when he was six 
years old, a child's letter, as it ought to have been, 
but in orthography and syntax absolutely faultless. 
Yet he was probably indebted less to his early 
schools than to the social atmosphere in which he 
grew np. The minister of his boyhood was the elder 
Dr. Payson, whose fame, though eclipsed by that of 
his more brilliant son, was hardly second to his in 
the substantial qualities which made him the fore- 
most man, not only in the town of his residence, but 
among the clergy of Cheshire comity. The shap- 
ing power, in manners, culture and character, of the 
country ministers of New England in the first two 
decades of this century can hardly be imagined by 
those who are not old enough to have witnessed it. 
The boy whose history we are tracing attended 
school in his native town till the age of twelve, then 
was sent to the Academy at New Ipswich, and af- 
terward was under private tuition till at sixteen 
he was fitted for college, and his father gave him 
his choice between a college education, a business 
life and the life of a farmer. He chose the latter, 
probably as a born son of the soil, from the native 
and inevitable instinct which determined to so large 
a degree the philanthropic industry of his later 
years. He worked on his father's farm long enough 
to acquire and retain through life the elementary 
practical knowledge, on which scientific knowledge 
could be so engrafted as to make it serviceable, 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



15 



in very much the same way in which an architect 
derives lifelong benefit from having' been appren- 
ticed to a carpenter in his boyhood. 

But his uncle had been removed by death, and 
the business which he had founded had increased 
so rapidly, as at once to need young Wilder's ser- 
vices and to promise for them an ample reward. 
He therefore became his father's clerk, and on at- 
taining his majority was made partner in the con- 
cern. At the same time he was appointed j:>ost- 
master of the town. The following year he was 
united in marriage with a fellow townswoman, in 
many respects of kindred spirit, of lovely character, 
superior culture and winning manners, whose death, 
after a union of eleven years, was his first great 
sorrow, and probably the greatest sorrow of his life. 

He showed as a young man the versatile genius, 
which gave him in maturer years so many and very 
diverse connections with society. He was skilled in 
sacred music, officiated as chorister on important 
occasions, and as a performer on the bass-viol was 
leader of the village orchestra. In common with 
the best citizens of his day, he took an active inter- 
est in military affairs, bore the most laborious part 
in the formation of the Rindge Light Infantry of 
which he was the first captain, and obtained, as col- 
onel of a New Hampshire regiment, the title by 
which he was afterward known. As a field-officer 
emeritus he subsequently became a member of the 



16 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Ancient and Honorable Artillery, and was at one 
time the commander of that corps. He attained 
high masonic honors while still a citizen of Rindge, 
though it was not till his removal to Boston that 
he reached the supreme grade, from which, in 1867, 
he went to Paris as the delegate of the Grand 
Lodge of Massachusetts, and was the only Ameri- 
can whose voice was then and there heard in the 
World's Convention of Masons. 

But Mr. Wilder was in training' for a larger 
sphere, and in the best possible training for a more 
extended commerce. There have not been want- 
ing conspicuous instances in which merchants of 
established reputation have formed their habits of 
diligence, punctuality, thrift without meanness, gen- 
erosity without ostentation, and especially, of prob- 
ity and integrity, in precisely such a school as was 
afforded by the variety-shop in Rindge. Mr. Wilder 
left Rindge for Boston at the age of twenty-six, 
his father shortly afterward retiring from the busi- 
ness, which passed into the hands of his son-in-law, 
Stephen B. Sherwin, and his younger son, Josiah. 
Mr. Wilder on his removal to this city entered up- 
on the wholesale dry-goods business, and in this, 
as dealer and importer, he continued, sometimes 
with, sometimes without, a partner, until he became 
a partner in a commission house for the sale of do- 
mestic fabrics, with offices both in Boston and in 
New York. He lived to say on his eighty-fifth 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



IT 



birthday: — "I have been constantly in business 
for nearly threescore years in this city, and I beg 
to assure you, my friends, that there is no title 
which I prize more highly than that of an upright, in- 
telligent and enterprising merchant of Boston." 
When Ave consider what sort of men they were who 
before his time had given to Boston merchants their 
world-wide fame for every trait that could make 
their profession what it ought to be, it indicates the 
most strong and estimable qualities of mind and 
heart for one to say this before the men who knew 
him best, and to have their unanimous suffrage for 
his merited place on that roll of honor, without a 
momentary shadow on his integrity and trustworth- 
iness. It is worthy of note, too, that with him, as 
with so many of like type, the strait way of honest, 
fair, and faithful dealing led to prosperity and af- 
fluence, while more crooked paths have been strewn 
with the wrecks of fortune no less than of charac- 
ter. With vigilance at least equal to that which 
our president bestowed on his own property he 
watched that committed to his charge. He did not 
regard himself as relieved from responsibleness by 
sharing it with others. As a director of one corpo- 
ration for more than half a century, of another for 
more than forty years, of others still for shorter 
periods, he made such trusts veritably his own, 
not sinecures, but posts of personal service, and 

in those times of financial embarrassment which 
2 



18 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



have not been infrequent, of arduous and anxious 
duty.. 

Of political honors he was not ambitious, and 
seems to have accepted office, not because he 
sought it, but because he was sought for it, and 
to demands for service of whatsoever kind he had 
never learned to say "No." Thirty-eight years 
ago, he was president of the senate of Massachu- 
setts, having previously been a member of the 
lower house and of the executive council. At that 
time, I think, it would have been discreditable in 
this state for a man to contribute to his own elec- 
tion by money, speech or canvassing, so that choice 
by a respectable constituency was what it no longer 
is, a certificate of character. 

Mr. Wilder's devotion to horticulture, which his 
early tastes made inevitable, was probably hastened 
by his bereavement. Under the shadow of deep 
grief, he naturally sought a more quiet abode than 
his city home, and in 1831 he became a tenant of 
the house and grounds in Dorchester, built and 
laid out by Governor Sumner, which he bought 
the next year, and occupied for the residue of his 
life. He now found the most congenial employ- 
ment for his leisure hours, and as he was always 
an early riser, he had no small part of the solid 
day for his garden, greenhouses and fruit trees. 
He brought to this new life just the kind and de- 
gree of knowledge which could not fail of growth. 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



19 



Had he been brought up in the city or on a place 
like the Sumner estate, he would have been con- 
tent to let things take their course without essen- 
tial change. But he abandoned the culture of his 
father's farm and came to this widely different 
sphere of operation with knowledge enough to en- 
able him to ask questions that could be answered, 
and to try experiments intelligently, so that the 
questions which he put to nature received their 
gainful answers; while his experiments, wisely di- 
rected, were oftener than not successful, and when 
not so, their failure had a teaching power for the 
apt and mindful learner. 

It was but a little while after his removal to 
Dorchester that he became a member of the infant 
Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and intimate- 
ly associated with its first president, General Henry 
A. S. Dearborn, who had in his time no superior 
in taste for the beautiful and in generous propagan- 
dism of all that appertained to aesthetic culture. 
Whether the earliest important enterprise of that 
society was an improvement upon nature, I am one 
of the few who can claim the privilege of doubting. 
In what to my younger hearers may seem a prehis- 
toric age, I was a member of Harvard College, and 
regarded Sweet Auburn as the loveliest spot on 
earth, rich in the earliest and latest wild flowers 
of the season, the anemone and violet, the golden- 
rod and aster, commanding unobstructed views of 



20 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



river, field and forest, town and village, and the 
favorite haunt of our Saturday afternoon pilgrim- 
ages. This charming spot the Horticultural Soci- 
ety purchased for what then seemed the enormous 
price of six thousand dollars, with the intention of 
making a cemetery of a part of it and an experi- 
mental garden of the rest. The cemetery portion 
was laid out. I well remember, in 1832, attending 
the dedicatory service, at which Judge Story gave 
the address, and but a little while after I followed 
what was mortal of the celebrated Spurzheim in the 
first funeral procession that entered those gates. Mr. 
Wilder bore an active part in that movement, and 
was ready, as on all like occasions, with his gener- 
ous subscription. After a year or two it was found 
that the interests united in this purchase could be 
better pursued apart, and the Mount Auburn Cor- 
poration bought the estate of the Horticultural 
Society, pledging to the society one-fourth of the 
proceeds from the sale of lots. This agreement was 
proposed by Mr. Wilder, when the committees of 
conference of the two corporations were on the 
point of separating, in despair of alighting on any 
plan that would be mutually satisfactory. The 
result was the cemetery of which you all know the 
conspicuous beauties and the glaring deformities, 
and an annual income to the Horticultural Society 
of from three to ten thousand dollars, from which 
was erected the hall in School street, on the present 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



21 



site of the Parker House, replaced a few years 
later by the building in which we are now assem- 
bled. 

In 1840 Mr. Wilder was chosen President of the 
society, and remained in office for eight years, dur- 
ing which period he officiated at the laying of the 
corner stone, and superintended the erection, of the 
first hall, and presided at two triennial festivals of 
peculiar interest for their brilliant array of illustri- 
ous guests. 

In the practice of ornamental horticulture, Mr. 
Wilder bore the leading part which might have 
been expected- from his official position. He at one 
time had no less than three hundred varieties of the 
camelia, many of them produced by his own exper- 
iments in hybridization. His attention was at the 
same time directed to the culture of fruit, especially 
of pears, of which he had eight hundred varieties on 
his own grounds. Before retiring from office in the 
Horticultural Society he issued a circular calling a 
convention of fruit growers, which was held in New 
York, and rcsnlted in an organization, first called 
"The American Congress of Fruit-Growers," subse- 
quently and still bearing the name of "The Ameri- 
can Pomological Society." Of this he was the first 
president, and remained in office until his death, giv- 
ing instructive addresses at the triennial meetings, 
which, held in different sections of the country, have 
been of more service than can be easily estimated 



22 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



in improving and multiplying the products of this 
department of industry and enterprise. 
. But he was not content with flowers and fruit. 
With his native farmer instinct he applied himself 
to the more necessary, though with our present fa- 
cilities of exchange and transportation, hardly to us 
more useful, departments of agriculture. In 1849 
he took a leading part in the formation of the Nor- 
folk Agricultural Society, was chosen its president, 
and in the autumn of that year delivered at its first 
annual Cattle Show an address upon agricultural 
education, which had no little influence in calling 
attention to a need of our community, which now 
seems too obvious to be specified, but which then 
had hardly found its way to the public mind. He 
held this presidency in active duty for twenty years, 
and then was made honorary president, in gratitude 
for Ms preeminent usefulness in advancing the vari- 
ous arts appertaining to garden, orchard and farm, 
and for his special services and benefactions to that 
particular society. 

In the matter of agricultural education, Mi'. Wil- 
der was, as I have intimated, a pioneer. The year 
after his Dedham address, when he was President 
of the Senate, he prepared a bill for the establish- 
ment of an agricultural college, which passed the 
Senate by a unanimous vote, but was lost in the 
lower House, where the proportion of farmers was 
much larger than in the Senate, so that the vote 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



23 



shows that those who were most intimately con- 
cerned in the matter were utterly unaware how 
much it concerned them. Mr. "Wilder, however, 
succeeded in obtaining the passage of a resolve for 
the appointment of a Board of Commissioners to 
investigate the subject of agricultural schools. Of 
this commission he was made chairman, and he 
guaranteed the expenses, afterward assumed by the 
state, of President Hitchcock of Amherst College, 
in visiting and examining European institutions of 
this kind. The result was the establishment of the 
Amherst Agricultural College, of which he was the 
first-named trustee, which he kept for the remain- 
der of his life under Avise and faithful supervision, 
and which he enriched by more than a thousand 
trees and plants removed at his own cost and charge 
from his own estate. 

He was also president of the Massachusetts Cen- 
tral Board of Agriculture until it became a depart- 
ment of state administration, still remaining a mem- 
ber of the Board when its executive functions were 
committed to a salaried secretary. 

Mr. Wilder also took the initiative in calling the 
convention which formed the United States Agri- 
cultural Society, of which he w T as president for six 
years, acting in that capacity at exhibitions in five 
different states. 

I have given but an imperfect outline of Mr. Wild- 
er's labors as a loyal son of the soil; to describe 



21 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



them in full would transcend the outside, possible 
limits of a commemorative address. His eminent 
services were fully recognized by votes and costly 
testimonials from the societies which he served, and 
by the honorary membership of kindred societies, 
equally in this country and on the continent of Eu- 
rope. His work was not only warmly appreciated; 
it was genuine and efficient work, and probably 
greater than received distinct recognition. His was 
not a, but the leading mind in improvements that 
have contributed largely to the general health, com- 
fort and well-beiug. It is not many years since 
good fruit was rare and costly, and even apples in 
alternate years were few and dear. The meanest 
table can now command more and better fruit than 
could be afforded thirty years ago by families for 
above want; and it is easy to imagine how for a lux- 
ury so appetizing and so wholesome may check the 
craving for indulgences both harmful and perilous, 
and may relieve the barrenness and meagreness of 
diet which in former times made a poor home look 
and seem all the poorer. I have no doubt that the 
progress would have taken place if Mr. Wilder had 
never lived ; for inventors, discoverers and leaders 
in every department are never possible till in the 
onward movement of society their work is inevi- 
table. But none the less worthy of honor is he who 
so reads the times as to anticipate the dawn of the 
near future, and to hasten its advent. 



MARSHALL I\ W.ILDER. 25 

I can barely allude to the many and various pub- 
lic positions which Mr. Wilder filled at different 
times, as President of the Association of the Sons 
of New Hampshire ; as a Commissioner of the United 
States at the Paris Exposition of the World's In- 
dustries in 1867, at which he served as chairman in 
his own special department of horticulture ; as pre- 
siding officer on several commemorative occasions 
of commanding interest in Dorchester; as made 
first and foremost in numerous instances in which 
the leading place could be filled only by one whom 
the community could trust and honor, and only with 
the labor and sacrifice which for a worthy purpose 
he was always ready to bestow. 

The Society which I represent to-day owes to 
Mr. Wilder no common weight of grateful obliga- 
tion. Under the presidency of the late Governor 
Andrew who, when he died, left no better man be- 
hind him, it had indeed attained a position of honor 
and usefulness which promised well for its future; 
yet it was poor in funds, inadequately housed, and 
scantily furnished for its specific work. You will 
not charge me with over-statement when I say that 
for the nineteen years of Mr. Wilder's presidency 
he could not have done more for the society with- 
out transcending the fitnesses and limits of his of- 
fice, and that, if this had been his sole charge, it 
would have been difficult for him to magnify it 
more in assiduous and gainful service than he did 
while it was but one of several not unlike places 



26 



N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 



which he was all the while filling with like pains- 
taking- fidelity. One of his earliest enterprises 
was the purchase and remodelling of the building 
in Somerset street; among the latest, the raising of 
funds for its enlargement. In the subscription for 
both these purposes, as in that for the fund for the 
librarian's salary, he set his wonted example of 
munificence, which was followed in great measure 
by the prestige of his name and through his per- 
sonal efforts and influence. Under his administra- 
tion the permanent property of the society (includ- 
ing its real estate) increased not less than twenty 
fold, while he left its library at least three times as 
large as he found it. You are aware, too, with 
how much dignity, courtesy and grace he presided 
at our meetings, what uniformly kind reception he 
gave to those who have contributed to their inter- 
est by specially prepared papers and in less formal 
utterances, and with what judicious skill, timeli- 
ness in subject and in illustration, elaborate finish 
of style, generous recognition of the broad range 
of knowledge and science within our legitimate 
scope, he has appeared before you in those admi- 
rable annual addresses, the last, with characteristic 
forethought, left so fully ready for delivery that 
the reverent listening to it was the most impres- 
sive of the tributes which at your first meeting 
after his death you could render to his memory. 

I have spoken of our president as a merchant 
from his boyhood till his death; yet had he re- 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 



27 



mained in active business, he could hardly have 
performed such a vast amount of service, and es- 
pecially have performed it during the last quarter- 
century of eighty-eight years, a period often er than 
not, spent by those who live so long, in retirement 
and ease. His old age of strenuous industry for 
the interests very near his heart was due to what 
most men would have deemed disabling infirmity. 
Early in 1863 he fell heavily on frozen ground, 
and received a severe shock which, though at first 
chiefly affecting the limbs, undoubtedly occasioned 
a permanent lesion of the brain. In the next ensu- 
ing June he had an attack of vertigo, after which 
he had not a moment's respite from pain in the 
head and a sensation which he described as like 
the incessant shaking of a bowl of water in the 
cerebral region. From that time he left the man- 
agement of the business, in which he was still a 
partner, to the junior members of the firm, and 
was thus free for labor in a larger field. But im- 
agine the energy of character, the stress of will- 
power, which refused to succumb to what to most 
men would have sounded the retreat from care and 
effort, yet only launched him into a career of more 
abundant labor and more extended usefulness. 

In my narrative of our president's life I have 
virtually sketched his character, so that a prolonged 
eulogy would be but a repetition of what has been 
as fully implied as if it had been expressly said. 
Yet I ought not to close without recalling in 



23 N. E. HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY. 

brief some of the prominent traits of his life and 
work. 

We cannot but admire the diligence and breadth 
of his self-culture. With a good foundation, indeed, 
of home and school education, he can have built 
up the superstructure, only in the intervals of al- 
most unintermitted toil and responsibility, and Iry 
an economy of time rarely equalled; and yet his 
is a case under a general law verified by my life- 
long observation, that time is elastic only when 
well-filled, — that it is they who do the most that 
always have room for more. 

His writings which, if collected, would make many 
volumes, impress me by their accuracy, chasteness 
and euphony of style, by their uniform appropriate- 
ness to occasion and subject, and by the evidently 
philanthropic purpose that pervades them. 

This purpose, indeed, underlies his whole charac- 
ter. He was ambitious; but his ambition was to be 
useful. He liked distinction, but as a benefactor 
of his race. He was generous, and — what is of far 
greater praise — his liberal gifts were from. what was 
rightfully his own, the proceeds of faithful indus- 
try and honest enterprise. Best of all, he gave him- 
self, mind, and heart, and soul. All that he was 
he put into his work; and when a man like him, of 
sound and well furnished mind, of nncorrupt integ- 
rity, of stainless purity, of a life fair and honorable 
in every aspect, gives himself in any worthy cause, 
the gift far transcends any pecuniary estimate. 



MARSHALL P. WILDER. 99 

I know from ample testimony how dear and pre- 
cious he was in his own home and to the hearts 
made desolate by his departure. It was his grief, 
we trust that it is now his joy, that his household 
was more than equally divided, — that there were 
more waiting for him than stayed to mourn, not for 
him, but for themselves. His repeated and severe 
bereavements only enhanced his tenderness and 
multiplied his offices of love for those that remained 
with him, and enlarged the circle of his beneficent 
sympathies. 

He could not have been all that he was but for 
the Christian faith inbreathed by his saintly mother, 
hallowed by the memory of a father whose up- 
right walk among men was a walk with God, con- 
firmed and matured by the temptations of early life 
in which it made him conqueror, by the successes 
to which it gave its healthful ministry, by the sor- 
rows in which it was the rainbow on the cloud. The 
prayer that he and those gathered with him at the 
family altar might be led in the paths of salvation 
had hardly died upon his lips, when for him it had 
its sudden, appalling, blessed, glorious answer. We 
are thankful that he lived so long and so well, — 
thankful that for him the fair volume of life was 
written through by his own hand with no appended 
record of inability, decline and decay. Happy he 
who thus passes, without intermission, from faith- 
ful work on earth to the nobler work of heaven. 



